Ashish Koul, "Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India" (Stanford UP, 2026)

September 9, 2026

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5 min read

In the late 1880s, a colonial ethnographer in Punjab classified the Arain Muslim community as “Subzivale”—vegetable sellers—and entered that label into official records. This single bureaucratic act set in motion a decades-long project by elite Arain Muslims to rewrite their social position. Rather than reject caste thinking as incompatible with Islam, they worked to prove they were a pious Muslim caste with a distinguished Arab lineage, producing genealogies, forming a caste association, and litigating property disputes to assert their uniqueness. Historian Ashish Koul’s new book, Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India, reconstructs this forgotten history and argues that caste hierarchies did not stop at religious boundaries—some Muslims were deeply committed to rearticulating their caste identities as consonant with their understanding of true Islam.

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What you'll learn

1 (02:02) **Introduction and Guest Background** - Host Ronak Boss introduces Dr. Ashish Koul and her book, "Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India" (Stanford UP, 2026), which examines how Arain Muslims in colonial Punjab articulated caste identity within Islamic frameworks rather than as a Hindu import.
2 (04:08) **Intellectual Journey: From Gender Politics to Caste** - Koul describes how her dissertation began with questions about Muslim women’s activism for Pakistan but gradually shifted toward caste after primary sources kept revealing caste consciousness.
3 (10:56) **Who Were the Arain? Social Location in Colonial Punjab** - Koul answers with two anecdotes: an internet search revealing an "Arain engagement ring" with an onion instead of a diamond (signaling social denigration), and recognizing Arain references in popular Punjabi music.
4 (23:30) **Defining "Islamic Caste"** - Koul unpacks the central yet contested phrase, explaining it indexes the multiple hierarchies elite Arain Muslims navigated—occupational, religious, and colonial taxonomic.
5 (33:32) **Women's Modesty and Caste Reinvention** - Koul highlights the caste historian Jalandari’s reinterpretation of women’s modesty, which renegotiated how Muslim women's respectability could be signaled.
6 (37:26) **Molvi Muhammad Dawood Ali Sufi Jalandari: The Caste Historian** - Koul describes Jalandari as a colonial education department employee, fluent in Urdu and Persian, who composed the official Arain caste history, *Saribhabari*, adopted by the Anjuman Arain.
7 (45:49) **The Anjuman Arain: Caste Association as Political Mediator** - The Anjuman Arain (established 1915) emerged from decades of informal elite activism, serving as a hub for social-religious reform, electoral mobilization, and caste-centric politics.

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Show Notes

Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India (Stanford UP, 2026) reveals that caste, usually assumed to be a feature of Hindu society, was in fact a trans-religious phenomenon in colonial India, as it is today. Even in an Islamic religious milieu that was supposedly more egalitarian than hierarchical Hinduism, colonial Indian subjects thought and acted in terms of caste. Through a focus on one agrarian Muslim caste known as Arains, Ashish Koul shows how some Indian Muslims transmuted caste and emplaced it within their understanding of Islam. During this time, Arain Muslims were derogatively called mali— gardener—instead of what they wished to be seen as—respectable landholders. Seeking to refute such negative portrayals, a group of elite Arains came together to develop a new Islamic vocabulary for caste.

Using primary sources in English and Urdu, Koul analyzes the intricacies of caste, religion, and politics among Muslims in colonial India. By asserting that being Arain was a way of being a true Muslim, elite Arains were able to intervene in significant debates about Muslim identity, colonial law, and political representation. Reinventing Caste shows that in order to understand why caste persists among South Asians, we must examine how caste consciousness has been entrenched within multiple religious traditions.

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